The Bush administration had to hustle to get its free-trade-with-Mexico plank ready for this week`s GOP convention in Houston. But the president may not want to put a lot of weight on that part of his platform just yet. Not until he nails down some loose ends.
Fashioned as a political springboard, this plank could become a trap door.
Not that free trade with Mexico is a bad idea. The plan President Bush announced last week from the Rose Garden has a lot to recommend it. Aside from hard-core protectionists, most would agree that the U.S. economy will benefit- as a whole and over time-from the free flow of goods and investment across the southern border.
Trouble is, people don`t vote as a whole and over time. They vote one at a time, and they will do it in eleven weeks, on Nov. 3.
That`s why free trade-a high-minded concept that sends chills up the spines of economists and corporate types-can be tricky as a campaign issue. The benefits of free trade with Mexico will build gradually as consumers pay less for imports and as workers get hired to produce more goods for export. The negatives will arrive in a rush, or as soon as it takes manufacturers to move their low-skill assembly plants to dollar-an-hour maquiladoras across the border.
The average voter may be cheered to learn that our 43.4 percent tariff on Mexican cantaloupes will be phased out in 15 years, but he or she isn`t apt to vote Republican just because George Bush is committed to lowering the price of breakfast. For most, other issues are more compelling.
Consider the voters of Cortland, N.Y., where Smith-Corona recently told 775 workers that it will move its typewriter plant to Mexico; or Springfield, Mo., where Zenith Electronics has told 2,000 television assemblers that their $11.27-an-hour jobs will soon move to Reynosa, province of Tamaulipas, where the hourly rate is $1.62.
Bet the ranch that free trade also will affect voting patterns among the 800 Chicagoans who once worked at the Stewart-Warner automotive gauge plant on the North Side and the 600 who used to make Rheem water heaters on the Southwest Side. Their jobs left for Mexico many moons ago.
It is estimated that a half-million jobs have been lost to Mexico since the maquiladora phenomenon began in earnest in the early 1980s. Even the most ardent free traders admit the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, if ratified by Congress, will speed the trend.
Granted, those lost jobs eventually will be offset. The Commerce Department figures 20,000 new jobs for every $1 billion in additional exports. Even without free trade, exports to Mexico have more than doubled in the last four years, to $33 billion. Do the math and the prospects look good, long term.
But Nov. 3 is not long term.
More Top Picks Razer Basilisk V3 35k
If the president wants to turn his free-trade plank into a political club this fall, he needs to keep our eyes on the eventual prize and do something to show he cares about folks being dumped by the Smith-Coronas and Zeniths.
And there is something dramatic he could do.
The president could make news in his acceptance speech this week by calling for a first-class program of extended unemployment benefits and career retraining for those made jobless by factory flight.
That would make headlines because George Bush has made nothing but vague promises about compensating the victims of free trade. And his actions have pointed in the other direction.
”We will work with Congress to see that dislocated workers receive proper assistance and training,” he told a convention of business editors and writers last year. A few months later, in his proposed federal budget for this year, he recommended that the government`s main program for compensating those workers, the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, be eliminated.
Congress kept the program alive, though at $200 million a year, the program is a drop in the federal ocean.
To be fair, Bush has advocated that another federal program, the Joint Training Partnership Act, is better suited to help the dispossessed. But he hasn`t proposed significant funding increases for that act, which provides money for states and cities to set up or subsidize local training programs. The Trade Adjustment Assistance program, on the other hand, is paid directly to workers in the form of extended unemployment benefits and tuition for re-training.
Bush doesn`t like that because it is an ”entitlement program”: You qualify, you collect. Sweetening such a program, the Republican right insists, would amount to an extension of the dreaded welfare state.
So keep your eye on the president when he steps on that free-trade plank in the Astrodome. And look out below.